قامت آيكان على مدار الأيام القليلة الماضية بنشر مجموعة من المستندات في إطار الاستعداد لاجتماع سيدني (٢١-٢٦ يونيو
٢٠٠٩) تمهيدا لمناقشتها خلال الاجتماع. وتشمل هذه المستندات ما يلي

المسار السريع لأسماء النطاقات الدولية لرمز الدولة: تم نشر الإصدار الثالث لمسودة خطة التنفيذ، ونسخة معدلة لاقتراح وثيقة المسئولية، وكذلك التفاصيل الخاصة بالمساهمة المالية المقترحة لدعم تطبيق أسماء النطاقات الدولية لرمز الدولة، بالإضافة إلى تحديث الورقة الخاصة بتطوير جداول أسماء النطاقات الدولية، ويمكن الاطلاع على جميع المستندات من خلال الرابط
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-31may09-en.htm
ويمكن أيضا التعليق عليها من خلال الرابط
http://www.icann.org/en/public-comment/public-comment-200907.html#fast-track
علما بأن التعليق على هذه المستندات سيكون متاحا حتى ١٥ يوليو ٢٠٠٩.

With Sydney opening on Monday 22 June, we strived to have this information up before this morning, Monday 1 June.

As such, it is probably as comprehensive a set of documents as ICANN has published for any meeting – addressing hard issues on IDNs, an important report on intellectual property issues as related to domain names, another huge piece of comment and analysis related to new TLDs, new financial analysis, more on community travel (which is coming), and other areas. I’m also pretty confident that this is the earliest (relative to an ICANN meeting) that this kind of material has been available.

So what was included?

IDNs: We posted the third revision to the Fast Track Implementation Plan. This was accompanied by explanatory memos that discuss: the form of agreement we will have with IDN TLD operators, financial contributions to ICANN, and the use of variant tables. The bottom line – we plan to launch this process right after the meeting in Seoul.

New gTLDs: We posted the Analysis of public comment, as we did before the Mexico City meeting. This document is intended to demonstrate ICANN’s careful consideration of all the comment. We decided to not publish a new version of the Guidebook since the overarching issues are not yet resolved.

Instead, we have identified several areas where the Guidebook can be amended and published excerpts – just those sections that are changing. We also published explanatory memos: discussing whether Chinese, Japanese, and Korean TLDs should be allowed to register one or two-character names since complete words in those languages are generally that short; describing all the research that has been done regarding morality & public order issues; describing a process for contractual compliance in community-based TLDs; and advocating a requirement that registries maintain thick Whois databases.

IRT and Trademark Protection: The Implementation Recommendation Team was created by a resolution of the Board to develop solutions to trademark protection issues. The IRT made its final report, it was posted yesterday. The report represents a ton of work by the 18 members of the team for which we are very grateful.

As an ICANN staff member closely associated with this important and huge amount of work, I would like to thank everyone from staff and the community that worked so hard in making it possible to publish this in time for review and discussion in Sydney.

ICANN has been working on a process for widely opening up the Internet space for a number of years. As that process has got closer to reality, people have started paying it more and more attention.

The “new gTLD program” envisions a very significant increase in the number of “generic top-level domains” – or Internet extensions like dot-com, dot-net, dot-info etc. At the moment there are 21 of these extensions of three characters or more. But the gTLD program is estimating a further 500 within the next two years or so. It’s a huge change in the Internet’s domain name system.

The “Applicant Guidebook” is what it says it is – a guidebook for those that plan to apply for a new Internet extension. In it, all the rules, procedures and processes are outlined in some depth. And currently ICANN is running an extensive and ongoing public comment and review process using that guidebook as the focus for discussion.

Which leads to the question of this blog post: so where are we up to with these new Internet extensions?

The Sydney meeting

ICANN makes its big decisions at international public meetings where the Internet community comes together and thrashes things out. There are currently three a year and the next one is at the end of next month, 21-26 June in Sydney, Australia.

It makes sense then to outline progress of the new gTLD work in terms of ICANN meetings – what will be done before the meeting, happen at the meeting, and be done for the next meeting (in Seoul at the end of October).

So, following the announcement made last night:

• We won’t be producing a third version of the Applicant Guidebook for Sydney (the first was published in October 2008 for our Cairo meeting in November; the second in February 2009 for our Mexico City meeting in March)
• Instead, the focus will be on what we have called “overarching issues” – particular areas of concern flagged up by the community
• However, there will be some excerpts of the guidebook with suggested changes following community feedback from the second version

Overarching issues

There were four overarching issues identified back in February:

• Trademark protection
• Security and stability
• Malicious conduct
• Demand and economic analysis

ICANN’s staff has been working hard with the community to find solutions to the questions and concerns raised about each.

Most visible has been trademark protection. In a nutshell, people are concerned that an explosion in Internet extensions will also see an explosion in cybersquatting and companies will either not be able to keep track or they will have to spend small fortunes making sure they are. So they want additional protections in place to stop this from happening.

On the flipside, many in the Internet community are concerned that if companies get too many controls on this expansion of the Internet that they will end up with too much influence and this may damage the innovative edge that the Internet has become renowned for. So a careful balance is being sought.

To cut a long story short, there is currently a report produced by those companies most concerned about this issue which has been put out for public comment and that comment period closes on 24 May – in time for comment to be summarized and the results to be discussed in Sydney. The hope, of course, is to get closer to a solution by the end of the meeting. There will no doubt be other suggestion solutions but at the moment this report is the focus of community attention.

So, that’s trademark protection. Oh – no – a quick addition. After Sydney, once ICANN (hopefully) has a fairly solid solution, the staff are going to run four meetings in London, New York, Hong Kong and Abu-Dhabi during July/August so that word gets out and people are able to make suggestions for any further tweaks.

This is one of the problems of overseeing a global network – you have to get the word out around the world so that people don’t feel as if they didn’t have a chance to comment on the proposal before it happens.

Also, just to give a quick insight into the difficulties of this sort of work, if the community in Sydney still disagrees widely about the best solution to trademark protection, ICANN staff wouldn’t have much to take around the world and so would have to consider cancelling the planned global meetings
(as well as devise another way of trying to find a solution to the issue).

Anyway, quickly going through the rest of the overarching issues:

• Security and stability: the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) has long been a part of ICANN and it has been looking at the issue of what impact a large number of new Internet extensions may have on the domain name system. The SSAC will have a series of public meetings in Sydney discussing their work on this so far.
• Malicious Conduct. I think this has been renamed “malicious behavior” because we are talking about people behaving in ways that may be legal but which are still “malicious” – and “conduct” has legal implications. Anyway, the very popular “e-crime” session from the last meeting in Mexico City has been adapted to become a “malicious behavior” session – so serving two purposes in one session in Sydney.
• Demand and economic analysis. This was about trying to foresee the economic impact that the new Internet extensions may have – so everyone has a clearer idea about what we were embarking upon. ICANN commissioned two reports to this end and they were published for Mexico City and put out to public comment. I’m not sure what additional work has been done in this regard but there will be something for Sydney.

Other issues

Those aren’t the only issues surrounding the program but they are the big ones. Other issues include the complexities surrounding the fact that the new gTLD program will also include for the first time ever Internet extensions in other scripts and languages (called Internationalized Domain Names, or IDNs). So you will be able to have extensions in Chinese, Arabic, Hangul and so on. As you can imagine this is an additional layer of complexity.

And there is also an issue of “geographic names” – where people may apply for an Internet extension that is the name of a country or a city, town etc. Governments are, for obvious reasons, concerned about this. But at the same time there are already some people that have got the backing of the city councils and so on to apply for and run an Internet extension named after that city. So, this is another area where there needs to be careful discussions about what to do so everyone is comfortable with the final solution.

Your participation and comments

It is worth noting at this point that the reason ICANN goes through this extensive and repetitive comment and review process is so that everyone has a chance to make their case and have their views noted and listened to. We do this with every piece of important work.

One of the most common gripes however is that ICANN has “ignored” someone’s comments. No matter how many times staff try to explain that changes are only made once a huge variety of different views have been considered, it is of little consolation to those who believe strongly that their perspective was the correct one but that it wasn’t followed.

We do understand this frustration and so recently we have been producing extensive and objective summaries and analyses of the comments received on important pieces of work. The idea is that while you may still be annoyed that your suggestion wasn’t included, you can see all the other ideas and options outlined by others. Where possible, ICANN staff explains the logic and reasoning behind going one route rather than another.

Staff are never going to get it right straight off and so that is why the big items of work – and this new gTLD program is the biggest at the moment – are put through several iterations of public comment so that the careful compromises are then put out again for review. The idea of course is that over time people grow more and more comfortable with the proposed solution.

Anyway, with that in mind, we should be producing an extensive summary/analysis of the comments made to the second version of the Applicant Guidebook before the end of this month.

Third version

Normally that summary/analysis would be used to produce a third version of the Applicant Guidebook. But because work is still continuing on the overarching issues, it was decided not to put out an entire new version that would have big, undecided gaps in. Particularly when the overarching issues will have an impact in many different sections of the overall guidebook.

So, the focus is on the overarching issues for Sydney, plus there will be excerpts of parts of the guidebook that include suggested changes derived from the feedback received to the second version. The idea is to progress both with the overarching issues and with those parts of the guidebook that people specifically focussed on last time around.

Timeline

So there you go, that’s where we’re up to. An enormous amount of work to be done in Sydney. The hope is that the various meetings go well enough that it will be possible to produce the third version of the Applicant Guidebook in time for the Seoul meeting in October.

If that happens, and if people are pretty happy with it in Seoul (so there are comparatively few changes), then it should be possible to get the whole thing agreed to and signed up by the end of the year. And then the whole process could open up in the first quarter of 2010.

So that’s the current timeline – although it is all dependent on you, the community, to find consensus on a lot of still-undecided issues. Staff is doing all it can to get that agreement as fast as possible without rushing people. If it all goes smoothly, we will see an extraordinary expansion of the Internet’s naming system in 2010 – and who knows how that will change how we all see this revolutionary network.

But if there are still problems and issues, ICANN — us as staff and you as the community — will continue working away until we get there.

See you all in Sydney.

In order to provide some answers and perspective, ICANN’s most senior executives dealing with the process – the CEO Paul Twomey, the COO Doug Brent and the Senior Vice President for Services Kurt Pritz – have done a video update on where we are now and where the process is going.

You can see it on the right-hand-side of this post. A transcript is below. Enjoy.

* Applicant Guidebook Update – February 2009
* [computer keys tapping]
* Applicant Guidebook Update – February 2009 ICANN
* Hi, I’m Paul Twomey, the President and CEO of ICANN–
* Paul Twomey, President & CEO, ICANN
* –and I thought I’d take this opportunity to make a few overarching comments–
* –about the new generic top-level domain process presently being undertaken by ICANN.
* The process has had 2 parts.
* The first has been a long-term process of consultation and policy development from the community up through the Generic Names Supporting Organization
* –which has taken nearly 3 years.
* Since June last year, the board of ICANN has then asked the staff of ICANN to work through what is feasible in terms of implementation–
* –and that is where we are presently in the process.
* End of last year, we put out for comment a draft Applicant Guidebook for people who were thinking of applying and to get the feedback.
* I’m very pleased to say that we received over 1,000 responses to that document–
* –and I think that’s a great success.
* We are not yet complete by any means.
* Doug Brent – Chief Operating Officer, ICANN
* In a lot of ways, I think this new gTLD process that we’re running is exemplary of how the ICANN model really works.
* So the cycle is really pretty simple.
* Policy approval led to an implementation guidebook that was reviewed by the board and approved for posting.
* The community provided extensive feedback.
* That feedback is now being processed and the guidebook updated as we process these comments.
* The result will be an analysis of the comments so the community can see their comments were really heard–
* –and an updated draft guidebook that will be reviewed by the board and, as you can imagine, particularly on some key issues.
* That then updated guidebook will be posted in English and 5 other languages–
* –presented to the community in Mexico City–
* –and undoubtedly considered further after that time.
* I think we have already seen, through this response period, very clearly–
* –that there is a demand from a large number of people who are looking at potentially putting in applications.
* There has been another family of responses, many of them from industry associations–
* –focusing on some broader, overarching issues.
* First of all, and probably the most pressing, has been brand protection issues.
* Secondly has been concerns about whether the introduction of new gTLDs, DNSSEC, IDNs–
* –is imposing a form of challenge to scale in being able to implement.
* One of the third major issues is is the implementation of new gTLDs going to make it more difficult to manage–
* –some of the malware, phishing, pharming, and related type issues that already exist within the DNS system?
* I don’t think it’s anyone’s intention that brand holders should be held to any form of extortion in the operation of new gTLDs–
* –particularly at the second level, and that’s an issue which needs to be discussed.
* On the concerns about potential confusion and for the increase in malicious behavior that might emerge from having many more new gTLDs–
* –I think we really should think about this in a more creative way.
* I personally consider that we are facing now actually an opportunity for us to explore what the contractual frameworks could be for the new gTLDs–
* –both at the registry level and potentially flow through to the registrar level–
* –that might help us address some of the existing concerns that we already have.
* We have a body of legacy contracts and experience–
* –but potentially with these new gTLDs, we might be able to review and consider the contractual terms and frameworks–
* –which might help address some of the concerns of the people who are rightly concerned with these sort of malware and malicious behavior environments.
* One has to be conscious, however, that that can only be done in the context of national laws and what is feasible under those laws–
* –but nevertheless, I think we now also want to consider this an opportunity for an outreach and discussion with that community–
* –to think what would be feasible as well as with registries and registrars–
* –so that we can consider the new gTLD environment as a new way of considering–a new opportunity to consider–these contractual environments–
* –separate, if you like, from the legacy contracts that have been in place now for 10 years or more.
* Innovation is not something driven simply by demand in a marketplace.
* It is provided also by the opportunities in the structure of the marketplace and the technology available.
* We would not have a Skype, a Google, a Facebook simply because people said, “Would you like to have a Facebook?”
* These all come from entrepreneurs offering opportunities to a market and seeing what is feasible in an environment of innovation–
* –and that is an important part, I think, of the framework in which we need to consider the new gTLD round.
* Kurt Pritz – SVP of Services, ICANN
* The next version of the applicant guidebook will be published in anticipation of ICANN’s meeting in Mexico City in March.
* Some of the changes you’ll see in this new version of the guidebook will include changes to the evaluation criteria–
* –more detailed procedures, changes in fees paid by gTLD registry operators, more protections for others.
* You’ll also see areas where additional study will be undertaken or additional consultations will take place.
* So to summarize, I am very pleased and thankful to all the members of the global internet community–
* –who have responded to this first round process of consultation on the draft applicant guidebook for new generic top-level domains.
* It has been a very successful process of feedback.
* We will follow our usual ICANN process of consultation, putting things back out for discussion, try to summarize, get more consultation.
* That is the way we work.
* This can be a noisy and sometimes heated process–
* –and we will think through those issues and potentially put forward yet again another round of an Applicant Guidebook–
* –that people can look at and consider.
* So we are listening very carefully–
* –we are wanting to engage and discuss–
* –we are following the usual ICANN processes, and I’d like to thank you very much for being involved in that–
* –and being part of the community that’s actually making the future of the DNS.
* New gTLDs and the Internet
* Openness
* Change
* Innovation
* ICANN